The little things may not be a conscious element in your evaluation of a photo but the little things are what differentiate an exceptional photo from a good photo. Most people wouldn't be able to call out an eye breaking the skin line or a slightly out of focus eye but it most defiantly effects the experience of the photo. A distracting busy bokeh will pull the eye from the portions of the picture you want to emphasize if your style of photo uses bokeh as a creative tool. That said I have seen some people use that more distracting bokeh quality to enhance the emotion of a photo. Quite often in life differences are not a matter of what is better or worse, they can just be different. Buy the tools that let you create what you want to create and ignore the chest puffing. If a lensbaby is "better" for you than an otus it really doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, unless you are trying to convince them to pay money for your work.

A big factor of course is that a lot of people viewing at image won't know exactly why they like it less than another. A distracting out of focus area may not automatically stand out as such for the average payman but they will notice the overall effect.